Ami sojitra's Assignment: Waiting for Barbarian and Robinson Crusoe

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NAME: AMI SOJITRA

PAPER: AFRICAN LITERATURE

TOPIC: COMPARISON BETWEEN ROBINSON CRUSOE AND WAITING FOR BARBARIAN

COLLEGE: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, MAHARAJA KRISHNAKUMARSINHJI BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY

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Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe at the age of fifty-nine and it was an immediate success. The story of Robinson Crusoe that has delighted the young, and the old for that matter, for over two-hundred years was actually based on an experience in the life of a seaman, Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years on the deserted island of Juan Fernandez. - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/robinson-crusoe-introduction.html#.WOKIzJCY7qM

That Robinson Crusoe is a Defoe character is evident from the moment he finds himself shipwrecked. He acts immediately in the interest of survival, salvaging such necessities as he can from the stricken ship and building a rude shelter. Yet Crusoe’s concern is not only for his physical well-being; he begins a journal in which he plans to record his spiritual progress as it is reflected in the daily activities that mark his sojourn on the island. For nearly two decades, Crusoe works to create a life for himself, building what he needs, improvising where he must, and ultimately replicating a little corner of England on the desert island. What he accomplishes is beyond basic survival; he fashions an English life that is dependent on the transformation of raw materials into the necessities of his culture. He plants grain that he bakes into bread, he domesticates goats so that he might have milk, and he turns a cave into a cozy fortified dwelling that boasts comfortable furniture. When Friday arrives, Crusoe’s little English empire is complete: The conqueror has mastered both the territory and its people.

Defoe has created in Robinson Crusoe a man very like himself and very much a typical eighteenth century Englishman. Crusoe’s plebeian origins, his earnest industry, his tendency to see religious meaning in the mundane, and his talent for overcoming misfortune are all Defoe’s qualities. Like the average Englishman of his time, Crusoe is something of a bigot, and although he treats Friday well, the slave is never offered his freedom and must call Crusoe “Master.” Crusoe triumphs over his circumstances and environment, and indeed he manages to provide himself with a little paradise on earth; but he is English to the core, and with the first opportunity he returns to England and settles down to family life.

Waiting for Barbarian

“Waiting for the Barbarians” is a novel by the South African- born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. First published in 1980, it was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20^th Century and won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction. American composer Philip Glass has also written an opera of the same name based on the book which premiered in September 2005 in Erfurt, Germany.Coetzee took the title from the poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" by Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy.

J.M.Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarian is the Meditative and Melancholy tale of an aging colonial magistrate’s futile struggle against the stupidity, brutality and racism of a government which he has served complacently all of his life. The unnamed magistrate is reluctant to take any action which would disrupt the pleasant and secure course of his life; he wishes to serve out his days “On this lazy frontier, waiting to retire”, spending his time engaged in “hunting and hawking and placid concupiscence”. Waiting for Barbarians is an allegory that much is plain from the generic terms used to describe places, people and events. It is a story meant to tell a different hidden story. It is as much about modern day warfare and scare tactics. The title ‘waiting for Barbarian’ is taken from a line from Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy. The narrator calls himself an old man and spends almost all of his leisure time thinking of sex with girls. The difference between reading a novel such as Waiting for Barbarians as art and as propaganda is that art emphasis the universal. It is about human experience, the individual experience or the societal experience propaganda is about a specific issue with specific view point, specific agenda, about a particular society.

Waiting for Barbarians is about two main things: Complacency and Pain. It is a story pain, physical pain, and how its influence can drive and determines an entire society. Physical pain torture or threat of torture plays a large role in barbarians. Coetzee’s shows how at the same time man can be so afraid of physical pain as to trump any conviction or idea but also willing some times eagerly to dole out the some pain on others. The“Empire” in Barbarians is an established power in order to achieve some vague perhaps impossible objective. The Magistrate on Barbarians is a figure aroused from his complacency by a needling conscience that finally drives him to resistance against the very organization he embodies.
The nameless character, referred to only by his title is a cog in the well- old machine of power he begins as a rather non- sympathetic character and through his transformation becomes a powerful alley for justice and doing what is right, but as usual with those who try to do what is right in a difficult situation, he comes to ruin. His physical bodies abused and destroyed he is shamed and outcast laughing stock, but what the Magistrate retains is conviction, is a sense of displacement, a sense that he doesn't belong to or in the empire and does not want to be part of its ways. He wants to live “Outside History”. He wants to be inhuman because only humans are capable of the kinds of horrors against other humans that make us call them monsters.

AS POST COLONIAL TEXTS

The major post-colonial theme that is extremely troubling to readers of the book today, particularly perhaps for Western readers, is the way that Robinson Crusoe seems to assume an ownership over property that he has no actual claim over, simply because of who he is.

The post-colonial perspective on Defoe's Robinson Crusoe stems from the strand in Post-colonial studies that goes back to the classic realist or canon making texts of the colonial culture that participate in the textual politics of colonialism by upholding or allegorizing a colonial point of view. Crusoe's relation to the Black slave Friday is the issue here. The linguistic and religious colonizations are at work in the so-called civilizing project of Friday as undertaken by Crusoe. Joyce saw Crusoe as a typical Anglo-Saxon colonist. So did the likes of Coetzee in Foe where he tries to draw our attention to the silencing of the sub-altern voice in the text. Even Marquez's The Shipwrecked Sailor has shades of Robinson Crusoe but it subverts the colonial heroism-rhetoric in Defoe's text by making it prey to an inflated media construct at the end of his novel. Crusoe's home-buliding in the island is seen as a perfect metaphor for the process of colonization. The island is also called a 'colony' late in the text.

As far as the feminist angle is concerned, Coetzee's re-writing of it in Foe also makes gender a central issue by making a woman, who spent the days in that island with an old Crusoe and the dumb Friday, the narrator of the novel. The radical exclusion of the female which seems to characterize, typify and ground Crusoe's island-colony is inverted by Coetzee who not only inserts a woman (Susan Barton) into the tale but lets it become her tale; told by her. That the repressive agenda of patriarchy and colonialism go hand in hand is the point driven home.

"The main character in his allegorical novel, "Waiting for the Barbarians," is a magistrate in an outpost at the edge of an empire. He is aware of the dangers of passing judgement on the barbarians: while his fellow settlers blame them for lying drunk in the gutter, the magistrate finds fault with the settlers for selling them the liquor. Yet for all of his sensitivity he fails to understand the barbarian girl he adopts out of a mixture of compassion and lust. The cultural distance is too great, and at the end of the novel the magistrate concludes that his liberalism was no more helpful to the barbarians than the behavior of the soldiers who make war on them"

CIVILIZATION

The meanings of civilization

1)the control or governing influence of a nation over a dependent country, territory, or people.

2)the system or policy by which a nation maintains or advocates such control or influence.

3)the state or condition of being colonial.

4)an idea, custom, or practice peculiar to a colony.

The Magistrate begins to question the legitimacy of imperialism and.personally nurses a barbarian girl who was left crippled and partly blinded by the Third Bureau's torturers. The Magistrate has an intimate yet uncertain relationship with the girl. Eventually, he decides to take her back to her people.
Like an ideal colonizer Crusoe establishes his cultural dominance on the island too. He establishes the supremacy of his religion. Though the sincerity of Crusoe’s conversion and his religious commitment have been debated by critics, in Robinson Crusoe Defoe creates a Protestant who is tolerant, committed to essential practices, keenly evaluative of his own behavior in relation to his religion, intensely personal in his encounter with God, and committed through acts of interpretation to seeing God’s hand in everything. In the novel Crusoe develops a complex relationship with Friday, his find Friday willingly submits to Robinson’s orders in gratitude for having being rescued. Friday voluntarily accepts a lifelong servitude under a mutual verbal agreement.

RELATIONSHIP IN BOTH THE TEXT:

Robinson Crusoe is man of Man Trader. The relationship between Crusoe and Friday is rather mixed one. We are confused in throughout the novel that what the relationship between them is?? Because at first point of view we can say that they have relationship of father and son because Crusoe teaches Friday that how one can well behave in manner or teaches him that how to eat and he teaches him Christianity also so from this aspect we can say that they have relationship of father and son. But from the second aspect we realise that this is not the relationship of father and son but this is the relationship of master and slave from the second aspect. This colonial aspect of master slave relationship is shown in throughout the novel example like,

[ "I made him know that his name was to be Friday...
I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my name".]

This thing shows that Crusoe is master and he gives him name and snatched his identity from him and Crusoe never inform Friday of his real name, it displays certain hierarchy system in this novel example like Crusoe is Master and he is ‘Higher’ in position then Friday who is merely a servant of Crusoe. This is shown time of Crusoe that in that time servant is named by his master and this thing reflect by Daniel Defoe in this novel without knowing that what is his real name. In that period of time when slaves were named by their colonial masters and this is portrayed well when Crusoe gives Friday his name, without regard for what his real name might be. Friday, however, does not take this master-servant relationship badly; in fact, he welcomes it in an extremely grateful manner and displays behavior that Crusoe sees as surrender to him example like,

"he kneel'd down again, kiss'd the Ground, and laid his Head upon the Ground, and taking me by the Foot, set my Foot upon his Head; this it seems was in token of swearing to be my Slave for ever;"

The relationship between the magistrate and the barbarian girl is certainly complicated. It begins simply enough in that the barbarian girl is assigned the task of cleaning up the magistrate's rooms. Although she does a poor job of completing this task, the magistrate keeps that to himself and endures the presence of the girl, at first out of pity and then out of selfishness.

The relationship between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians is not at any point in the novel, a typical relationship. The Magistrates guilt for having been involved in a government that has for so long mistrusted and mistreated the barbarians manifests itself in his attraction to the barbarian girl. The affair begins on his part, as an innocent infatuation with the barbarian girl. Throughout the novel, he becomes more and more aware of the subconscious reasons he has for having such an attraction to the girl. From the time when he first begins the relationship with her to the time he leaves with her people is a progression of the clarity with which he views the relationship.

The Magistrate begins to be intrigued by the girl in a fairly natural way. As he sees her, a blind barbarian girl begging on the streets, left behind by her people, he feels an attraction for her. They begin their relationship (if such a one-sided relationship can actually be labeled one at all) in a completely physical way. The Magistrate is content with only dealing with her body. He massages her, bathes her, and sleeps next to her. He is completely satisfied with this seemingly normal relationship. So I lie beside this healthy young body while it knits itself in sleep into ever sturdier health, working in silence even at the points of irrediable damage, the eyes, the feet, to be whole again.As a combination of a lover and healer, the Magistrate feels comfort in being with the scarred, broken, barbarian girl. While he may not know yet why, the washing and massaging of the girls body brings him a certain healing effect. The Magistrate easily succumbs to ! the feeling of peace he receives from pampering her.

CONCLUSION:

Thus, Robinson Crusoe and Waiting for Barbarian both are different texts and both were written by different perspective. We can connect both in post colonial view and it is not false to say that barbarian or the one who is slave has always suffered and the relationship between black and white is always like master and slave.

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Ami sojitra's Assignment

Monday 3 April 2017

Waiting for Barbarian and Robinson Crusoe